I heard someone say this today, and had a hearty laugh. “If it all works out as I plan it…” Haha. Two things sling-shotted their way into my brain:
1) Things are always working out. Perfectly. Just maybe not the way some voice inside us is trying to convince us that it should. Why should we continue to listen to that voice? Has it ever proved to know what it’s talking about?
2) Expectations that anything should be different than what it is make us miserable. What a beautiful mystery everything becomes when we drop expectations. When we just Let Life Happen. It’s like reading a novel; we only enjoy it when we don’t know where it’s going to take us.
If we go along with the thought that everything is going perfectly well, at all times, we no longer try to see how everything is wrong. We no longer try to prove to ourselves that we are victims, or unlucky, or antagonized for no reason. We no longer live a life of disappointment.
I remember how often, right after I got paid for a big job, some invoice, some parking fine, some surprise would come along and need to be paid. I thought “how unlucky I am.”
Then one day, someone said to me, “How lucky that you got paid the other day. Now you can pay the invoice.” And I realized I had been looking at the situation the wrong way around. I had been seeing life in a way that would cause me the maximum amount of unhappiness.
Instead, when I allow that everything might be going right, even when we don’t understand it, I simply reverse engineer it and study the ways in which it might just be the right thing at the right time.
And then, suddenly, I begin to see life in a better light. And I become (gasp!) grateful.
As Swami Sri Yukteswar said, when someone apologizes to him for letting him down, asking if he’s angry: “No, of course not! … I do not expect anything from others, so their actions cannot be in opposition to wishes of mine.”
Joy Biscuits 